They say that time flies when you are having fun. Well, I think it might actually fly a little faster for people in the data center industry.

I say that because it doesn’t feel like a year since Equinix was honored for service excellence at the Telecom Asia Awards. But this month Equinix was once again recognised as the No.1 player in the Data Center Hosting & Colocation category.

This year the awards coincided with Questex’s Telco Strategies conference, which is very much focused on “digital transformation. And as the world’s largest interconnection and data center provider, Equinix is right in the middle of this global shift to the “digital economy”.

Achieving a successful transformation depends on a number of factors. But, there is one thing it relies on above all else, and that’s interconnectivity. This is where Equinix and the world’s broadest interconnection platform makes a difference.

By enabling enterprises to directly and securely connect employees, partners and customers to what they need, we help them to adapt to and leverage digital ecosystems, so they are perfectly positioned to create new value and generate growth.

Looking back on a busy year

Although the time seemed to fly by, Equinix packed a lot into 2015.

To begin with, we continued to advance our award-winning Cloud Exchange by expanding the cloud service provider pool and bringing new enterprises to new markets across the globe. They included Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, Aliyun, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

We also introduced a new approach – Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™) – aimed at helping enterprises disrupt their IT infrastructure and speed up the journey to becoming an interconnected enterprise. We did that for a few reasons, but mainly to help enterprises connect with people, locations, clouds and data by integrating the physical and virtual worlds where they meet.

One of the beauties of Equinix’s IOA approach is that it shifts the fundamental delivery architecture of IT, from siloed and centralized, to internetworked and colocated. By helping companies to re-architecture their legacy IT infrastructure into an interconnected one, Equinix becomes the ideal place for enterprises to solve critical IT challenges in areas such as speed, scalability, performance regardless of vendors. This is all possible thanks to its robust cross-connectivity with over 170,000 companies via Platform Equinix, Cloud Exchange and Internet Exchange.

This combination of global reach and service provider density allows enterprises to bring their applications, data and networks as close as possible to their users, customers and business partners – whether deploying in a cloud environment or a private infrastructure at the edge.

Innovation and performance pays off

It is this kind of innovation and performance that the Telecom Asia awards are designed to recognize and reward. And, with any luck, and Equinix’s continuous commitment to excellence and innovation, I hope we will have the opportunity to celebrate winning another award next year!